PROMETHEUS-1: A Satellite Framework for Research and Educational Access to Space

In this work, we present the PROMETHEUS-1 satellite mission, a 1P PocketQube designed to validate its development pipeline, to perform onboard Machine Learning tasks on photographs taken by onboard cameras, and to evaluate its active Attitude Determination and Control System implementation. PROMETHEUS-1 was developed under a collaborative initiative involving the University of Minho (UM), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), conceived to address the current lack of a unified and streamlined infrastructure for low-cost educational satellites. The project covers the lifecycle of a satellite mission, including the development, assembly, licensing, certification, launch, and operation of a flight unit, together with the construction of a dedicated ground station. PROMETHEUS-1 is based on the PyCubed-Mini platform, an open-source, low-cost, and user-friendly spacecraft architecture with flight heritage. PROMETHEUS-1, the framework’s first mission, was successfully launched and began operations in January 2025, becoming the first Portuguese PocketQube mission to reach space. It successfully demonstrated autonomous data processing and machine learning inference on resource-constrained hardware, significantly expanding the potential of PocketQube-class spacecraft.